Climate Change

Time for Real Action on Global Warming

Man-made climate change poses a severe threat to the future health of the planet and all that live on it. The good news is that we know what causes it, and know how to slow it down, and even stop it. The bad news is that we have made far too little progress, in great measure because we lack the political will. Some climate change has already happened, but much more awaits if we remain on the current trajectory.

CPR Member Scholars have worked to address three specific areas of climate change research and scholarship: Mitigating and Preventing the harm from climate change; and Adapting to climate change; Laying bare efforts by industry and others to preempt meaningful state and regional climate change efforts with a federal bill that would do too little to prevent climate change.

Uprooting Communities

Even as some politicians downplay the threat from climate change, a number of communities in the United States and across the globe have been forced to relocate to avoid being swallowed up by rising seas. Read about climate-induced relocation, displacement and migration.

Reaching Higher Ground

Politicians may be able to get away with ignoring climate change for a time, but American communities at the leading edge of the strom don't have that luxury. Read about tools communities forced to relocate can use as the seek higher ground.

Fighting Climate Change

The Clinton Administration mostly missed its chance on climate change; the Bush Administration actively fought progress; and legislation during President Obama's first term died in the Senate at the hands of Republican opposition and Democratic division, and the Trump Administration is open hostile to doing anything about the problem. The best remaining hope is state and private sector action.

Gulf Coast Adaptation to Climate Change

While efforts to slow and prevent climate change are vital, another important avenue for communities and policymakers is adaptation to what can no longer be prevented. This CPR paper explores community-level strategies for adaptation, with a focus on community participation.

Past Time to Move on Global Warming

Man-made climate change is as severe an environmental threat as anything in history of the planet. A quick review of the basics: human-caused pollution in the form of carbon dioxide and other emissions is collecting in the atmosphere, trapping heat from the sun and gradually warming the planet. The impact is already observable in a variety of ways: warmer average temperatures, more severe weather patterns, changes in migratory patterns of various animals as they seek cooler temperatures, abandoned habitat of many animal and plant species as conditions change, melting glaciers, and more. Down the road – and not that far down the road at current rates of polluting emissions – the effects will grow more severe: rising sea levels will reclaim land, displacing people and forever altering ecosystems; disruption of snowmelt cycles and melting glaciers will likely cause severe water shortages; warmer ocean water will give added punch to hurricanes; changing weather patterns and ocean temperatures will likely devastate existing ecosystems, kill coral reefs, and introduce new insects and other pests to cities and farms alike; and more. Indeed, all of these trends are already beginning.

The good news about climate change is that we have technologies on hand to take an enormous bite out of the current load of greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrid cars and other cleaner vehicles, together with cleaner energy generation hold great promise. And conservation of energy – appliances and vehicles that require less fuel – can make a huge difference, as well.

Mitigation and Prevention. One focus of CPR scholarship has been public policy aimed at preventing and mitigating climate change -- that is, trying to prevent it, to the extent possible, or mitigate its impact. During most of the Bush Administration, the President's allies in Congress blocked legislation, while his appointees in the Executive Branch argued alternately that climate change wasn't human-induced, that it would be too costly to do anything about, and that the EPA lacked authority to do anything. In 2007, the Supreme Court took the legs out from under the latter argument, in a case brought by 12 states and several local jurisdictions arguing that EPA had not only the authority but the obligation to regulation carbon dioxide emissions. (Their brief to the Court was written by CPR Member Scholar Lisa Heinzerling, who later became an EPA official in the Obama Administration, before returning to academia and CPR.) The Court held for the states, setting in motion a regulatory process to limit emissions.

Most observers agreed that the best policy approach on the problem would have been legislation that included measures tailored to the specific challenges of climate change. In the early years of the Obama Administration, Congress considered legislation to establish a "cap-and-trade" mechanism that would create a market for carbon emission allowances. Polluters would have been allowed to emit certain levels of greenhouse gases. If they produced less, they would have been able to sell to some other polluter the right to create emissions up to their cap. But the legislation died in the Senate in the face of near-unanimous Republican opposition to any meaningful climate change legislation, as well as divisions among Democrats on specific responses.

The failure of legislation prompted President Obama to direct the EPA to pursue regulatory options, a charge the agency embraced. The resulting set of regulations, most notably the Clean Power Plan, represent a significant step toward reducing U.S. global warming emissions, and paved the way for U.S. leadership on the issue, which in turn resulted in the historic Paris Agreement. All that said, the Trump administration and the Republican majority in Congress have taken dead aim at the Clean Power Plan, the Paris Agreement, and a variety of regulatory efforts to address this most central environmental challenge of our time. Read more about CPR Member Scholars work on mitigation and prevention.

Climate Change Preemption. Another focus of CPR Member Scholars' work has been to draw out the issues surrounding industry efforts to make sure that any federal climate change law includes a provision preempting -- that is to say, undercutting -- state and local climate change policies. The Member Scholars argued that preemption would undo the only significant progress on climate change made by any level of government in the United States, would run counter to the longstanding approach on environmental laws of establishing federal standards as a "floor" upon which stronger state and local standards might be built, and would hobble overall efforts to address climate change by tying the hands of the governmental entities best equipped to address such critical climate change issues as urban sprawl, zoning matters, renewable energy portfolio requirements for utilities and more. With the collapse of legislative efforts around climate change, the threat of such undercutting provisions collapsed as well. Read more about CPR Member Scholars' work on climate change preemption.

Adaptation. A third area of CPR scholarship relates to policy aimed at how we adapt to the effects of climate change that we can no longer prevent. CPR Member Scholars developed a number of projects fleshing out ways that specific communities could respond to climate change, including one aimed at the Puget Sound region.

Six Mythsabout Climate Change and the Clean Air Act.. Industry and opponents of action on climate change have taken to arguing that the Clean Air Act is somehow an "inappropriate" vehicle for regulating. Amy Sinden and Dan Farber explode the myths they weave in Six Myths About Climate Change and the Clean Air Act, CPR White Paper 1105, April 2011. Also read the blog post.

Adapting to Climate Change in the Puget Sound Region. CPR Scholars are engaged in a unique project to help the Puget Sound region map out an adaptation strategy to climate change. Learn about their work, and read their most recent publication on the subject, Climate Change and the Puget Sound: Building the Legal Framework for Adaptation, CPR White Paper 1108, by CPR Member Scholars Robert L. Glicksman and Catherine O’Neill, and CPR Policy Analyst Yee Huang; and CPR Member Scholars William L. Andreen, Robin Kundis Craig, Victor Flatt, William Funk, Dale Goble, Alice Kaswan, and Robert R.M. Verchick. Read the news release.

Houston Chronicle Op-Ed on Events that Change the Political Landscape. Read "Did a single week reverse energy fortunes forever?," by Victor Flatt, May 10, 2010, in the Houston Chronicle, on the confluence of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the approval of the Cape Wind project by the federal government.

CPRBlog Entries on Boxer-Kerry's Journey Through the Senate. CPR Member Scholars starting blogging as soon as the bill was introduced. Read what they've said. Or read their CPRBlog entries on Waxman-Markey, from the day it was introduced in the House through passage in June 2009 and beyond.